Monday, 1 February 2010

Global warming farce

You can feel the tide turning on this, or the wall crashing down, or the 'what' entering the 'whatever' (whichever metaphor grabs your fancy).

It's not so much that Paul Sheehan has written a somewhat sceptical article, it's the fact that it appeared in the SMH, until quite recently an unashamed promoter of the ideology that not only is global warming happening, we must all pay lots of money to stop it.

Here are 10 anti-commandments, 10 selected facts about global warming which have been largely ignored amid the orthodoxies to which we are subjected every day. All these anti-commandments are either true or backed by scientific opinion. All can also be hotly contested.

Sheehan then goes on to provide a random grab-bag of things that are most likely true and most certainly underreported—the polar bear population is increasing, Barack Obama wants nuclear power stations to multiply, the scientific consensus on global warming is a myth, etc etc.

The two from Sheehan's article that, if true, ought to make Christian bandwagoners on global warming ashamed:

6. The politicisation of science leads to a heavy price being paid in poor countries.

After Western environmentalists succeeded in banning or suppressing the use of the pesticide DDT, the rate of death by malaria rose into the millions. Some scholars estimate the death toll at 20 million or more, most of them children.

7. The biofuels industry has exacerbated world hunger.

Diverting huge amounts of grain crops (as distinct from sugar cane) to biofuels has contributed to a rise in world food prices, felt acutely in the poorest nations.

Those who have used the global warming momentum to push Christians (and others) to take costly action now (though the exact actions are frequently vague in nature, imprecise in application and uncertain in effect) have by and large remained silent on the real, current impact of a Western world largely sold on the reality of the still uncertain phenomenon of anthropogenic global warming.

The greater and possibly less visible sin of Christian apologists for global warming is not about how money and effort has been mis-spent, however, but how it's worked to distract some from the true end-time scenario; that Jesus will return to judge the living and the dead.

I agree that the tide is turning among certain people. You'd be hard pressed to find many listeners of Australian talkback radio convinced that the sky is falling and that we need to impose an ETS to save the world. Among the battlers and ordinary residents of outer suburban and rural Australia the tide has certainly turned. But whether the typical inner-suburbs chardonnay-swilling SMH reader (whether Liberal or Labor voting) and the political class (which tends to think like them and not the battlers) will ever realise/publicly admit that the whole AGW thing was blown way out of proportion is not so clear. People like this generally don't like to admit they were wrong. And even if they do I'm sure they'll manage to find a way to lay the whole thing at the feet of George W. Bush and John Howard etc, claiming that it was a vicious conservative plot all along and that the world faces another imminent existential threat unless we pour trillions of dollars into their grand plans for saving the planet.

So I'll believe it when the Guardian, the NY Times etc come out with front page stories on how the whole AGW thing was a load of cobblers and they issue an unreserved apology for their complicity in perpetuating the lie. Oh and an apology from Al Gore (and him donating all the money he made from his propaganda to some worthy causes) would be a nice gesture as well.

The comment on DDT is not linked with Climate change. That was a decision to remove from use an organochloride poison that lasts for decades in the environment. However, your point is valid that the "West" in all it's economic rationalism "wisdom" often makes decisions with little appreciation of the impacts on other nations. There are probably countless examples of this - such as growing crops for biofuels instead of food.

I agree with you in that the problem is that we tend to get caught up in all the politicisation and spin doctoring, and media sensationalism, which tends to marginalise God's view of the world and His plan.

Surely the new heavens and earth will be devoid of politicians and journalists! [or at least their manipulative endeavours to win votes/sell newspapers.]

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I worked until the beginning of '09 for Matthias Media as a writer and editor. They had me on a leash longer than the one that Theseus attached to the minotaur. Still chewed through it but.
I've worked for the Australian Fellowship of Evangelical Students and the Anglican Church. I'm currently with the Church Missionary Society as a writer and editor. See more on facebook.
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